Intro + tip for decluttering email

Intro + tip for decluttering email

08-08-2006, 08:44 PM

Hi everyone, I'm new to the forums. I've just bought the GTD book last week after seeing a mention about it somewhere. I'm still chewing my way through the book and finding it very inspiring although it is quite hard to grasp in places. Anyway, I've started my collecting process and I'm really loving it. I was in dire need of help and it is making a difference already. I've put so many bits of paper in the recycling box that the poor collectors are going to be straining their backs this week!

As part of my collecting process, I am going through my email folders and tossing old stuff. I already had lots of different folders and subfolders set up in Outlook for the different areas of my life but they were getting a bit clogged up and unmanageable. I tend to store a lot of emails in these folders for reference purposes and I had loads of completely useless emails, some of them from 3 years ago!

If you're an email horder like me, a good tip I discovered is to create 'unsorted' subfolders in your various clogged folders. Then you move everything from the various inboxes to their respective unsorted folders. Then you can go through the old stored stuff at your leisure. For some reason, just having lots of empty inboxes makes it much mentally easier for me to then do the sorting. When an 'unsorted' folder is empty you can just delete it - that way, the presence of an unsorted folder acts as a visual reminder that you haven't dealt with that category yet.

I also created a lot of new subfolders. For example, the folder for one project was totally scary because all the stuff I wanted to keep was just in the inbox. I've split it down into seven subcategories and an unsorted folder. It's a lot easier to find the information I need now, although I admit that I haven't finished tackling the hundred or so emails in the unsorted folder yet.